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Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography. By VASANT MOON Translated by GAIL OMVEDT. With an introduction by ELEANOR ZELLIOT. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001. 224 pp. $65.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).
There is no segment of India's population as important, or still as ignored by outsiders, as its Untouchables, the people who have recently moved to identify themselves as Dalits. Even as we proceed in reevaluating the imperial viewpoints of our Orientalist heritage, few, I think, realize the degree to which the contemporary western view of South Asia is permeated by a Sanskritization that incorporates elite caste prejudices. And yet, we know we need to understand better what the graded discrimination of caste hierarchy and untouchability has meant, and continues to mean.
This small book does not offer us either a grand plan for reassessing our view of India or a theoretical vision of what "untouchability" has meant, but it does offer an accessible glimpse of the life and times of one Dalit and the people he grew up with. It is the modest story of a relatively unimportant individual, who is at the same time one of the most significant Indians of the twentieth century: one of the Untouchable activists who followed B. R. Ambedkar's lead out of the shadow of the supposed-- pollution, wished upon them by Brahmanical society, into the center of contemporary India's political stage.
How many of us recognize that Gandhi's term "Harijan" is resented by a majority of former "untouchables," as a patronizing denigration preferred by caste Hindus? (Moon himself would merely say Hindus.) How many, aside from specialists in the nationalist movement, remember or teach of how the struggle...