The Political Potential of Dalit Autobiographies: An Interview with Dr. Shivani Kapoor

The Socio-Legal Forum is pleased to publish an interview with Dr Shivani Kapoor on her work, presented during the Conference on Indian Political Thought held at the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru (NLSIU). Dr Shivani Kapoor is an Associate Professor and Political Scientist at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), whose work engages with questions of caste, the senses, and labour from an interdisciplinary perspective. 

The interview was conducted by Dr Chandrabhan P. Yadav, who teaches History at NLSIU. His research interests include Buddhism, Ambedkar, and caste.

The paper presented at the conference focused on the autobiography of Professor Tulsi Ram and the visions of politics articulated within it. In this interview, we explore Dr Kapoor’s reflections on Professor Tulsi Ram’s two-volume Hindi autobiography, focusing on the political possibilities embedded in the autobiographical form and its engagement with caste and Dalit experience. Dr Kapoor foregrounds the potential of Dalit autobiographies as sites for articulating political thought and theory.

Your presentation in the Conference was on the autobiography (Murdahiya) of Dr Tulsi Ram. Can you tell us more about him and the text/texts he has written? 

Dr Tulsi Ram was Professor, Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies, School of International Relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. He was born in 1949 in Azamgarh District of Uttar Pradesh. Around 1966, he moved to Banaras and eventually pursued higher education at the Banaras Hindu University (‘BHU’), including his doctoral work.  During his time at Jawaharlal Nehru University, possibly during late 1970s and early 1980s, he was a part of the student organisation, All India Students’ Federation (‘AISF’), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (‘CPI’).     

In his teaching and research, he specialised in the politics of the former USSR, Trans-Caucasian Region and Russia. Apart from his two-part autobiography, Murdahiya and Manikarnika, Dr Tulsi Ram also published on socialist and communist politics across the world. Dr Tulsi Ram was an erudite and complex thinker, deftly carrying distinct intellectual and political traditions – socialism and communism; Buddhism and anti-caste thought – together, in spite of their differences and contradictions. Many commentators have observed that he was not only aware of these contradictions, but also actively grappled with them. Particularly troubling for him, commentators have observed, was the refusal of Marxist and socialist thinkers to engage with the question of caste. He remained a life-long member of CPI, but as Professor Chaman Lal remembers, he always maintained an independent critique and thought on the caste question, including an adherence to political Buddhism. It is noteworthy that his last rites were also held in accordance with Buddhist norms, Professor Chaman Lal writes. 

What are the lessons for politics in the autobiography of  Tulsi Ram? 

Murdahiya, the first of his two-part autobiography was published in book form in 2010. Murdahiya was initially published as a seven-part series in the Hindi magazine, Tadbhav in 2007. Manikarnika, published in 2014, covered his life in BHU. Dr Tulsi Ram was supposed to write the last part of his autobiography, but that never happened due to his demise in 2015. 

I would consider Tulsi Ram’s autobiographies to be texts/interventions in political thought and theory. For some decades now there have been consistent efforts to decolonise political thought and theory, as well as to find indigenous contours of political ideas in the Indian subcontinent. Most of this discussion has relied on uncovering or re-reading texts from the past and to reconfigure them as texts of “Indian” or “indigenous” political thought and theory. I would argue that texts like Tulsi Ram’s autobiographies, provide us with a unique vantage to broaden the criteria for what can be considered political thought and theory from the subcontinent. 

Tulsi Ram’s writing is structured through Buddhist philosophical texts. Buddhism, both as a religion and as a political philosophy, is a crucial component of this region’s history and thought. In the contemporary moment as well, Buddhism as a religion and ideology has proven to be one important refuge against the violence of caste. As a practicing Buddhist, Tulsi Ram would have no doubt relied on Buddhist texts and ideas to frame his lifeworld. However, what is remarkable is the way in which Tulsi Ram frames his autobiographical self-using Buddhist philosophy. The genre of autobiographies usually attempt to reconstruct a “true” past. Tulsi Ram’s work complicates this truth claim by interspersing his life with Buddhist philosophy, as if putting his younger self in conversation with an ideology which he discovers only later in life. By doing this, as I have shown elsewhere, Tulsi Ram fundamentally produces an anti-caste self in the textual form. His autobiographies should thus be considered as texts dealing with not just Buddhist ideas but also a text of anti-caste political thought. 

I am intrigued by the phrase “Buddhism as political philosophy” and Buddhism as “indigenous thought.” Can you specify the contours of this philosophy and why do you call it a political philosophy (at least Tulsi Ram’s version of it)?

This is a very interesting question. Buddhism, especially in the form of a political religion deployed against the caste discourse, is a veritable political philosophy. And this argument is certainly      not new. For instance, in his book, God as Political Philosopher: Buddhism’s Challenge to Brahmanism (2000), Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd argues that Buddha was a rational, social thinker rather than a religious one. The Bhikku Sangha, Ilaiah argues, is ultimately a political institution and is the best illustration of Buddha’s political philosophy. Buddhism as a political idea in favour of equality and egalitarianism, and in the specific context of South Asia, as the principled opposition to Brahmanism, certainly builds a conceptual and philosophical worldview. Tulsi Ram’s autobiographies are steeped in this philosophical world. Thus, I argue that political Buddhism in general but Tulsi Ram’s autobiographical writing in particular shows us an instance of how political and social theory has developed indigenously in South Asia, through conceptual frameworks such as those provided by a political reading of Buddhism. I am aware that by saying this I am locating political philosophy and theory in a literary genre. But as Dalit writing has effectively demonstrated and as scholars like Gopal Guru, MSS Pandian and Udaya Kumar have argued, autobiographical writings, especially those coming from the margins, are fundamentally political texts.  

Can we trace the sources of Tulsi Ram’s thought-world?

This is a very interesting and complex question. I have begun to trace the influences on him somewhat in the first question. But his autobiographies offer a much more nuanced and layered version of how Tulsi Ram came to construct his thought-world. One of the most significant influences on him is clearly Buddhism. If we consider autobiographies to be public versions of selves, then Tulsi Ram very obviously thought of Buddhist philosophy as one of the central axes of his self. A remarkable feature of his autobiographies is the way in which he relies on Buddhist texts, stories and ideas to frame his life – past and present. 

Communist and socialist ideologies are another major influence on Tulsi Ram’s life and works. He also recalls having heard about labour strikes organised by Amrut Dange and EMS Namboodiripad, as a child. Tulsi Ram’s uncle was a preceptor in the Shiv Narayan sect and one of his followers, a textile mill worker, recounted his experience of these strikes in Bombay. Tulsi Ram writes how these memories influenced his choice of following the communist ideology. Lastly, of course his lived experience made him aware of the violence of caste. An anti-caste thought, composed of Buddhist philosophy and the egalitarian ideal of communism, thus becomes one of the most prominent axes of Tulsi Ram’s life world. 

Is Babasaheb Ambedkar absent as a source in shaping the thought-world of Tulsi Ram? 

Absence would be a strong word. In the two volumes of his autobiographical writing, Tulsi Ram writes a couple of times about Dr Ambedkar and is clearly reading him and thinking about his ideas, especially on caste. According to Tulsi Ram (Manikarnika, 63), Rahul Sanskritayan and Buddha, sealed his conviction for atheism. It is also here that he mentions Ambedkar attributing to him the idea that those who feed ants but keep human beings deprived are hypocritical. Tulsi Ram traces these as the influences for his extreme faith in humanism as an ideology. Yet Buddhism and communism occupy more of a centre stage in his thought-world. It won’t be too far-fetched to propose that Buddhism and its anti-caste philosophy also brings together Tulsi Ram and Ambedkar. 

Can you also tell us about your other works and how they connect with or interact with contemporary political thought?

Apart from examining Dalit writing, a large part of my research work stands at the intersection of caste, sensory politics and labour. In particular, I examine the experience of caste produced through smell in leather production in India. Through this work, I have posited two major arguments. One, that caste is experienced and transacted through the sensorial arrangement of spaces, bodies and objects. This has important implications for our understanding of disgust, humiliation, social justice, and violence. Second, my work locates the animal, specifically, the animal carcass, as an important element of the political. Leather, with its antecedents in the death and in the carcass of the animal, provides an excellent vantage from which to unravel the idea of the political, which is largely understood as being based in living human subjects. Through this perspective, my work examines contemporary political questions over the animal body, food practices, environment, and labour by intersecting these ideas with caste.  

Fascinating! Can you further explain what you mean by “animal carcass as an important element of the political?” Can you provide some examples of this?

There is a growing body of work on the question of the animal and the non-human in social and political discourses. For instance, Bindu Menon’s work on how the intertwining of human and animal worlds in films produces a complex narrative on caste, animality, and even the human condition. Similarly, Radhika Govindrajan’s book Animal Intimacies, looks at multifarious ways in which human and animal worlds intersect to produce a politics which includes both care and violence. This body of work aligns with the larger interest in examining the anthropocene critically. In the Indian political conversation, the animal occupies an important position. The animal features in debates over food, sartoriality, urban space, caste, and religion from the colonial to the present times. The question of the animal carcass is a subset of these debates but also stands apart from it. In an article written about the Una protests of 2016, I have argued that the animal carcass posits an interesting question for our understanding of caste. Unlike the live animal, the carcass is marked by the stigma of pollution, disgust, and revulsion. The use of the carcass – materially and symbolically – by Dalit groups in protest against the Una lynching by upper-caste vigilantes, forces the carcass (and its stench) as a political subject in our public discourse.