In 1916, Ambedkar launched a critique of brahmani patriarchy and endogamy, which he called the mechanism of caste, as it functioned to regulate the sexuality, social mobility, and economic resources of women—especially surplus (i.e., unmarried or “unmarriageable”) women—and thus safeguard brahman male power and sexual privilege by preventing those women from seeking intercaste marriages and transgressing the boundaries of the caste hierarchy. Ambedkar applied theories of economics and value to the institution of marriage and endogamy to understand the surplus woman who as an excess became a danger to brahmani patriarchy. In so doing, he offered foundational critiques of the gendered and sexual power of caste domination. Whereas surplus men were revered, surplus women were seen as a menace to brahmani male power, always threatening to entice men to transgress caste. Women were, insofar as their sexuality required regulation, central to the institution of caste. Endogamy restricted conjugal mixing across castes and perpetuated inequality by fusing social and sexual reproduction.
[...] Although on the one hand, performers in South Asia typically hailed from a range of lower-caste and Dalit communities, and on the other, all performing women were, through a generalized logic of good and bad women, viewed as tainted Dalit women performing in Tamasha [a type of public theatre] and shouldered a specific burden determined by the logics of the sex-gender-caste complex. Tamasha people and Tamasha women, or “dancing girls,” were always on the move, performing in cities and villages. Their constant movement without a settled location was seen as evidence of their unstable, illicit, and uncivilized character. Tamasha women did not measure up to the moral benchmarks necessary to achieve the status of woman or even manus. Although many Tamasha women were married, had monogamous relationships, and bore children (especially sons), elites viewed them as surplus women operating outside the marriage-and-family scheme, and as such, they were characterized primarily by perceived flexible sexual arrangements with many men. Consequently, they became women on the loose or “common prostitutes”—marked by both their superfluity and sexual excess and availability—and as agents of moral and sexual contamination, they had to be contained and even eliminated. I do not aim to vilify prostitutes but rather illuminate how elite British and touchables, through the sex-gender-caste complex, cunningly amalgamated a range of dancers and singers, including Tamasha women, into the category of the prostitute. For them, the cause of her violation was her (surplus) sex and (excessive) sexuality, which naturally sought to entice and expropriate. Whereas Ambedkar observed that the surplus quality of the widow was managed through a set of iterative practices of negative control, that of the Dalit Tamasha woman, linked more closely to the prostitute as sexually charged and available, was viewed as both negative and corrosive and yet necessary in order to assert the authentic caste selfhood of the savarnas and later, in the radical politics of Ambedkar and the Ambedkarite Jalsakars, of Dalits too.
Thus the “play” of Tamasha successfully occludes “work” in the sense that the always already alienated sexual labor of the Dalit woman performer produces the surplus that keeps the sexual-caste economy in place. Tamasha and its practitioners paradigmatically represented excess, a kind of waste of the world. Tamasha was a carnivalesque and bawdy performance, a pure amusement, and the performativity of the Dalit Tamasha woman could not be put to productive use in the eyes of most elite. Caste violence remained at the root of these contestations between the colonized and colonizers, between Indians and the British, as well as among Indians themselves. Although Dalits’ life-world changed over the century, the systemic caste mechanism, steeped in sexual purity, maintained differences between Dalit and higher caste women.
When I spoke to each of them in 2016, Meena Javale [a Dalit Tamasha woman] and Chetan Hivale [a caste Hindu Tamasha man] rehearsed a more than century-old debate over prostitute women and their corrupt dhanda (business, profession). Since the end of the nineteenth century, all paternalistic, masculine actors—colonial and postcolonial state agents, elite touchables, and radical Dalit men—formed a tripartite patriarchal structure, sharing a discourse of decency through which they engaged in debates over ashlil and reinforced the social power of the sex-gender-caste complex. As symbols of the ashlil and the bibhatsa (disgusting), Tamasha women were at the center of this patriarchal triangle, objectified by a common desire to police public morality in order to govern (themselves) and build a moral and modern India.
Shailaja Paik, The Vulgarity of Caste: Dalits, Sexuality, and Humanity in Modern India
