摘要：This book is a marvel of meticulous scholarship which fills an important gap in the history of untouchability in Tamil Nadu. It is so well-documented that more than a third of it consists of endnotes and so clearly written that its accomplishment is also best stated in its own words: “Specifically, the book shows how during the thirty years from roughly 1890 to 1920 ways of thinking emerged through the concerted efforts of a ‘caste-state nexus’ – a de facto alliance between British and Indian officials and native high caste employers of pariah labour – first to elide, and when that was not possible, to downplay and avoid, the problem that the pariah posed. As a consequence of concerted strategies of evasion, the Pariah Problem was only posed and never solved, then as now” (3). The “ways of thinking” involved referred to above are primarily three: (1) that caste, and discrimination based on it, is a religious phenomenon; (2) that social solutions to the problem should be prioritized over political and legal ones such as “the state’s enforcement of the fundamental rights to equality and access” (2); and (3) emphasis be placed on “reservation” as a mode of affirmative action, as a substitute for more fundamental structural changes. As the narrative unfolds along these lines, the book becomes an absorbing combination of scholarly erudition, analytical force, and lucid exposition.
