Mellichamp Lecture Series
in Global Civil Society
PRESENTS
Gyanendra Pandey
Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History, Emory University

The Question of Conversion in the

Dalit Struggle

The dalit of my title (literally, 'crushed', 'downtrodden' or 'oppressed') refers to India's Untouchables or ex-Untouchables, outcastes, Harijans, Scheduled Castes, to cite a few of the names used to describe them. The word is now widely used as a term of militant self-assertion on the part of many who have long been at the very bottom of the social, economic and cultural heap. Dalit conversion refers, in its most common usage, to the mass conversion of dalits to Buddhism in 1956 and after- wards, as well as to Islam, Christianity and other religions at various other times, both before and after 1956. However, I use it also to refer to the conversion to formal citizenship - the abolition of Untouchability in the Indian constitution, the institution of universal adult franchise, the extension of key legal and political rights to all sections of the population, with particular safeguards and support for especially disadvantaged groups - with all the consequences this has had for Indian society and politics. I use it, moreover, to distinguish another tendency, which may be described loosely as a conversion to the 'modern': to democracy, rationality, modern scientific education, civility, the city. In my talk, I want to ask the question: what is the work of 'religion' and 'religious conversion' in this broader struggle?

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University. Before Emory, he taught at the University of Delhi and at the Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories (2006); Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (2001); The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990); and numerous other single-authored and collaborative books and articles. He is currently working towards a history of the making of the dalit and the African-American middle classes.