UNTOUCHABLE CITIZENS: Dalit Movements and Democratization in Tamil Nadu. Cultural Subordination and the Dalit Challenge Series, vol. 4

UNTOUCHABLE CITIZENS: Dalit Movements and Democratization in Tamil Nadu. Cultural Subordination and the Dalit Challenge Series, vol. 4. By Hugo Gorringe. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage Publications, 2005. 397pp. US$64.95, cloth. ISBN0-7619-3323-9.

Amongst the most important developments in modern Tamil politics has been the return to prominence, since the early 1990s, of the region's autonomous Dalit movement. Hugo Gorringe's detailed study of the internal workings of this movement-focusing primarily on the Dalit Panther Iyakkam (DPI), and based on multi-sited fieldwork amongst rank-and-file activists-sheds critical light on a phenomenon about which reliable information and independent analysis are virtually non-existent.

Against oft-repeated claims that India suffers from a "crisis of governability," occasioned by the emergence of new political movements organized along caste, religious and ethnic lines, Gorringe argues that the rise of Tamil Dalit activism is better understood as a "democratization of democracy." For far from threatening government, the Tamil Dalit movement demands simply that the laws of the land be enforced: that the routine lynching of "uppity"...