ABSTRACT

The caste order – like all social hierarchies – structures emotions in particular ways, and in turn depends on emotions, thus structured, for its reproduction over time. In North Indian vernaculars, to ask who feels ghṛṇā (disgust) towards whom is often to trace the boundaries of the touchable body politic. Ghṛṇā karnā – doing disgust – describes a set of practices often identical to those known in a political register as ‘practices of untouchability.’ Thus, ve ham se ghṛṇā karte hain (‘they are disgusted by us,’ or, better, ‘they practice disgust on us’) is among the more common ways that Dalits describe their treatment at the hands of privileged castes. This article tracks usages of ghṛṇā in two vernacular North Indian sources from the early twentieth century in order to throw critical light on the inculcation of disgust as advantaged and disadvantaged caste observers have described it. In Hindi tracts composed by members of the Hindu reformist organization the Arya Samaj, ghṛṇā appears as an impediment to the majoritarian project of Hindu encompassment of its erstwhile ‘untouchable’ other; Arya Samajist polemicists seek to expose Hindu disgust towards Dalits and to redirect it towards new targets. In oral traditions that circulated among Dalit castes engaged in sanitation labour in the late colonial period, parables of encounter between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ give utterance to a critique of ghṛṇā as antithetical to moral action and as opposed to life. Grounded in historical and ethnographic evidence, the article develops preliminary ideas towards an affective theory of caste and untouchability.

摘要

像所有社会等级制度一样，种姓秩序以特定方式构造情感，而这种情感又随着时间的推移而依赖于如此构造的情感。在北印度俗语，请问谁觉得ghṛṇā（厌恶）对谁产生往往是跟踪触摸的政治体的边界。加纳·卡纳（Ghṛṇākarnā） –令人作呕–描述了一系列习俗，这些习俗通常与政治名册中称为“不可接触的习俗”的习俗相同。因此，达利特人在特权阶级的手中描述对他们的待遇的更常见的方式之一就是ve ham seghṛṇākarte hain（“他们对我们感到反感”，或者更好的是，“他们对我们感到厌恶”）。本文跟踪ghṛṇā的用法二十世纪初，在北印度的两个白话文献中，有优势的和处境不利的种姓观察者都描述了这一点，以使人们对厌恶的灌输给予批判性的理解。在由印度教改良主义者组织Arya Samaj组成的印地语区中，ghṛṇā似乎阻碍了印度教的多数派计划，将其以前“不可触及的”其他人包括在内。艾莉亚·萨玛吉斯（Arya Samajist）的辩论家试图使印度人对达利特人的厌恶情绪暴露，并将其重新导向新的目标。在殖民时期晚期从事卫生工作的达利特种姓之间流传的口头传统中，“可触摸”和“不可触摸”之间相遇的寓言使人们对“ ghṛṇā ”提出了批评。与道德行为相对立，与生活相对立。该文章以历史和人种学证据为基础，针对种姓和不可触摸的情感理论提出了初步的想法。